


Don’t Reach For The Moon

by tielan



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Drift Bond, Gen, Ghost Drifting, Relationship(s), Sparring, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 00:22:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1798702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pentecost’s voice reverberates through his head, the bone-deep resonance of it, drilling them day and night. Raleigh starts with those memories and tries not to think of the empty space beside him, moving with the focus and determination that lived beneath the skin of his easy-going brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don’t Reach For The Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Written to fill [this Pacific Rim kinkmeme prompt](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/2747.html?thread=4521147#t4521147):
> 
> _While working at the wall, while he's off shift, Raleigh finds a discarded length of pipe around the right width and length, and starts to fool around with it. before he knows it, he's running kata. It's one more way to center himself, a way for him to imagine Yancy is still with him, sparring with his brother in his imagination. It's a way to hold on to what he's lost, if only for a short while._
> 
> Also, the next volley for FIC WAR with **quigonejinn** , whose "[The One Where...](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1752182)" ended with Mako-as-Jean-Grey and Raleigh-as-Wolverine sparring. Tag, Rhod, you're it! :D

It’s not quite the right length, definitely not the right weight. But Raleigh’s hands balance it and he moves into a ready stance, waiting.

There’s no-one to spar with.

For a moment the wound gapes, his world dark and bleeding around the pain. Then he forces himself to move into the opening stances of a solo _kata_ and it gets easier – a little.

Pentecost’s voice reverberates through his head, the bone-deep resonance of it, drilling them day and night. Raleigh starts with those memories and tries not to think of the empty space beside him, moving with the focus and determination that lived beneath the skin of his easy-going brother.

Down in the foundations of the Wall, standing amidst the steel struts that will reinforce the poured concrete when the trucks come tomorrow, Raleigh Drifts with his brother’s memory.

It’s not enough.

It’s all he has.

 

When the time comes to move on along the Wall, Raleigh leaves the hanbõ behind.

 

Working on the Wall is gruelling, exhausting. At the end of the day most men have barely enough strength to drink down their ration of beer and climb into bed.

Raleigh finds his mind and body itching, even after he settles down in his bunk. His head buzzes with thoughts, memories, and the echoes of that last cry: _Raleigh, you listen to me—!_

The hole inside him demands filling, and the next day sees him spending his break gleaning through the waste pile, looking for a pipe, a strut, anything that might serve in place of a length of wood.

He goes through the moves, through the solo drills, again, again, again. And when he’s done, he falls into his bunk and sleeps like the dead.

It becomes a pattern at night – a drink, his _kata_ in the night, and then bed.

When the _kata_ split into the pair forms, he nearly stops. The last time he did this, Yancy stood across the mat, ready to meet and match him. The cold of the metal strut burns his palm, his shoulder, his soul with everything he’s lost, everything he’ll never have again.

 _Beckets don’t give up, Rals,_ Yancy’s voice drawls in his ear, and Raleigh wants to scream that it’s all fine for Yancy, because he’s _dead_.

He pushes his muscles into the starting stance and tries not to let the empty space eat at him.

 

This time he takes the hanbõ with him when he goes.

 

Months pass. The Wall grows. The kaiju keep coming. The Jaegers keep fighting them.

Raleigh’s getting better with the hanbõ. He thinks he might be nearly as good as he was when he and Yancy were piloting, although it’s hard to be sure without an opponent.

Although...sometimes Raleigh feels like there’s another person moving with him, practising the moves. There’s no physical presence, just the sense of someone else working in counterpoint to him, their hanbõ meeting on a plane of existence Raleigh can’t see or feel, but which is there all the same.

It almost feels like Drifting again, their psycholinguistic patterns matching as they dance back and forth. But this opponent isn’t Yancy – too small, too light on his feet, with a shorter reach and a different style of fighting – fluid and flexible.

Raleigh finds himself looking forward to the nights; to the sense of someone in his head again, their weight pressing against his heart. Maybe it’s all in his head, just his desperate imagination coming up with anything to fill the hole in his soul.

He doesn’t care; he’ll take it.

 

All the way to Hong Kong, Raleigh doesn’t let himself think about Drifting with anyone who’s not Yancy.

 

The Hong Kong Kwoonmaster has a reputation for being tough but also for getting the best out of her students. After one session in her Kwoon, Raleigh sees why she has a reputation. She demands his best, accepting no excuses.

“You have been practising,” she observes when he starts up: first stance, second stance, third.

“Just with a length of pipe in my spare time.”

“Hmf,” is her only comment until they take up against each other.

Her style is too sharp for Raleigh – a snake’s swift strike, sudden and angular. But it pushes him to do better, to stretch himself in the _kata_ – something he hasn’t been inclined to do for a long time.

At the end of the session, she grunts. “You worked too long on the Wall – all brute force and blunt instrument. You are not ‘in it to win it,’ Ranger Becket, you are here to find someone Drift-compatible.”

Raleigh disagrees. He was Drift-compatible with Yancy, and look how that turned out.

He’s here in Hong Kong for one reason only: to die in a Jaeger.

 

Warming up, Raleigh tells himself he can do this. Find a co-pilot, drive a Jaeger with them, make a run on the Breach. And maybe then he can die in peace.

 

He challenges Miss Mori because he’s annoyed. The pilot candidates she picked aren’t _right_ – not even close. And Raleigh’s starting to wonder what _she’s_ like on the mats.

Not that Pentecost wants to let her try.

Raleigh pushes it – maybe a little too hard. Brute force and blunt instrument. But it gets him what he wants.

She saunters across the mats, as though he’s the newbie and she’s the pilot with years of experience under her belt. Her expression mocks him, challenges him, even as he chides her for treating this lightly.

And then the real trial begins.

She’s fluid and flexible, potent as whiskey in attack, sharp as a knife in defence. It’s not a fight. It’s not even a dialogue. It’s a _dance_ and Raleigh knows the moves and so does she, as neat as though they’ve practised it, back and forth, wind and waves, tongue and groove, yang and yin. And she doesn’t know, doesn’t comprehend - not even when she has him on his back, down on the floor, with his hips up to relieve the pressure on his leg, giving him no quarter, making him no allowance.

Mako doesn’t realise what they have – she can’t, or she’d never turn it down.

 

The test run is perfect from Raleigh’s point of view. Her mind in his and his in hers. Compatibility. Wholeness. Completion. Even her RABIT-chase can’t change that.

 

After Pitfall, after the medical, after shaking hands and slapping backs, after a long night curled up together like kittens, and a long day of accepting congratulations and tears alike, they go back to where it started – back to the Kwoon.

“I dreamed of you,” Mako says as they move through the solo _kata_ , first stance, second, third, fourth…

“Ghost-Drifting.” They’re facing each other, not mirroring each other’s moves, but matching all the same. “I thought I imagined you.”

“You missed Yancy.”

“Yes.” Their hanbõ swirl through the air, echoing to Pentecost's instruction, _more control, Miss Mori,_ steady and strong in the wake of Hong Kong, in the breach. “You’ll always miss Pentecost - like your parents. It never completely goes away. That doesn’t mean it can’t get easier.”

And they have each other, now. It doesn't need saying, so Raleigh doesn't say it.

They split into the paired _kata_ without conscious thought, no agreement needed.

She lunges, he parries, and then they’re back in the dance.

“Concentrate,” Mako teases when Raleigh loses.

“Better watch it,” he retorts.

 

Mako’s not Yancy.

She doesn’t have to be.


End file.
